Rod Bennett > Quotes

“The early Church is no mystery, but I must say that, for me personally, it was a terrible challenge. I studied the writings of the four witnesses. I studied everything else I could find from the early Church. I looked and looked for something resembling my own faith, for something at least similar to the distinctives and practices of my own local church . . . and found only Catholicism. It was like something out of a dream, a nightmare. I had always believed, on the best authority I knew, that Roman Catholicism as it exists today is a rigid, clotted relic of the Middle Ages, the faded and fading memory of a Christianity distorted beyond all recognition by centuries of syncretism and superstition. Its organization and its officers were nothing but the christianized fossils of Emperor Constantine and his lieutenants; its transubstantiating Mass and its regenerating baptism, the ghosts of pagan mystery religion lingering over Vatican Hill. Catholicism represented to me the very opposite of primitive Christianity. The idea that anything remotely like it should be found in the first and second centuries was laughable, preposterous. I knew, like everyone else, that the early Church was a loose fraternity of simple, autonomous, spontaneous believers, with no rituals, no organization, who got their beliefs from the Bible only and who always, therefore, got it right . . . like me. I also knew that the object of the Christian game, here in the modern world, is to “put things back to the way they were in the early Church”. That, after all, was what our glorious Reformation had been all about. That, for crying out loud, was the whole meaning of Protestantism. So, as you might guess, finding apostolic succession in A.D. 96, or the Sacrifice of the Altar in 150, did my settled Evangelical way of life no good at all. Since that time I have learned that many other Evangelical Christians have experienced this same painful discovery.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Christianity made people unpatriotic, made them intolerant and dogmatic, willing to criticize other people’s gods and alternative lifestyles.”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“G.K. Chesterton put it well: “It was the best thing the world had yet seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best that conquered; it was the best that ruled; it was the best that began to decay. . . . the Roman Empire was recognized as the highest achievement of the human race; and also the broadest. [But] a dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheaters and aqueducts. Man could do no more.”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“The explosion of grotesque immorality we associate with imperial Rome—open prostitution and perversion, the bloody gladiatorial combats, and so forth—is best understood as a response to this religious collapse: a mass of hopeless, worn-out cynics trying to shock themselves awake whether with pleasure or pain. Yet deep inside, they were hungering for something higher. What the Romans needed, and in the worst way, was a religion worthy of them—something they had always had to do without.”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“by the grace of God, I was able to follow in their footsteps on April 6, 1996, when, at the great vigil of Easter, I was confirmed as a Catholic. I chose St. Augustine of Hippo as my patron saint. And I mean literally that I made my decision by God’s grace alone. No intellectual process, no course of reading, can ever, in and of itself, bring a man to faith—either in Christ or in His kingdom, the Church. Faith is a miracle. And what the four witnesses had offered to me was the story of another miracle—another incarnation. I knew, and already believed with all my heart, that the Son of God had become Man at Bethlehem for my salvation; “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). But now I could see that the early Fathers believed more: They believed that His Bride had become flesh too. The”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“The gooey, amorphous “spirituality” of paganism allowed people to do their own thing in matters of religion. Sing, shout, prophesy, pray, go into a trance . . . nobody gave a fig, so long as you did not attempt to impose any of your high-falutin’ opinions on anyone else.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Irenaeus, writing even earlier, puts it more beautifully still: “By the wood of the Cross the work of the Word of God was made manifest to all: his hands are stretched out to gather all men together. Two hands out-stretched, for there are two peoples scattered over the whole earth. One sole head in the midst, for there is but one God over all, among all, and in all.” This is”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“the once-vital nation of the Romans was slipping farther and farther down the slopes of madness. Material prosperity and external peace were not enough; then, as now, they made poor substitutes for hope and idealism. Ever more fragmented, daily more frightened, helplessly angry and pathologically skeptical—the Roman people soon began to retreat into morbid individualism. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. The government, presented with an exploding population of ungovernable libertines and hopelessly hamstrung by political gridlock, did what governments always do under such circumstances: incapable of believing in a Shepherd, they started looking for a Strongman.”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“After all, I had spent quite a lot of time in denominations, para-church movements, and “home-cell” groups whose publicly announced intention was “to restore the pure Christianity of the early Church”. Not one of them had ever sent me back to any first- or second-century documentation for evidence. So who knew? Who could have imagined—with so many competing versions of “pure New Testament Christianity” on the market out there—that finding out what the early Church was like might be as simple as opening up the records and having a look? Like”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“And thus the name Katholikē Ekklesia begins to be used, as it is here, to mean “the original Church known everywhere”. And that original Church, Theophorus insists, is always recognizable as the one that “clings inseparably” to a bishop appointed by the Apostles.52”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Nicaea really was, after all, a sort of “coming of age” for the Church—and like many adolescents, she hesitated to leave childhood behind.”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“And Eusebius Pamphilus, writing in 325, had this to say about the Church of his youth: As always happens when there is abundance of liberty, our lives became indolent and careless; we envied one another and did harm to our brethren; any wretched excuse was sufficient to start a war of arms—as it were—with a spearthrust of words; leaders poured ill fame on other leaders; nation rose against nation; pretense and damned hypocrisy seemed to reach the limits of their evil height. . . . Like senseless people we did not trouble to make our God propitious and benevolent toward us but like certain atheists who consider that human affairs are neither guarded nor watched over (by God) we piled wickedness on wickedness. Those who were supposed to be our pastors disdained the paths of divine piety and inflamed their hearts in contests one with another, only adding thus to the quarrels and threats, the rivalry, the envies and hates of the times. They filled their time in striving for position in no different a manner than from the princes of this world.12”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

“The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points [of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul, and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them, and teaches them, and hands them down, with perfect harmony, as if she possessed only one mouth. For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the Churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world. But as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shineth everywhere, and enlightens all men that are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth.29 How”
― Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words

“Christians ended up compromising even more than they had already; learning to “play ball,” as it were, to live and let live, to keep silent when they ought to have spoken, to render unto Caesar the things that were God’s. Yes, the third-century Church had found a way to make peace with paganism—and it was proving deadly.”
― Rod Bennett, The Apostasy That Wasn't: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church